


Age of Consent

by havisham



Category: Boardwalk Empire
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:56:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/pseuds/havisham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy Darmody in the trenches: how he got there, and how he got out again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Age of Consent

**Author's Note:**

> Pre-series. Broken narratives. A blowjob. An Oedipus complex. A dead lover. (It's WWI, what do you expect?)

He didn’t need to go, that was the joke of it.

He had chosen to go, he had chosen this. It wasn’t out of a sense of patriotism -- growing up with Nucky running things had ingrained in him a bone-deep sense of cynicism. So when he heard the phrase _for your country_ , he would think of Nucky, and men like him, all clambering on top of each other, piling corruption on corruption, tearing down whatever _for your country_ had ever meant.

No.

He didn’t do it _for his country_.

***

Gillian hadn’t wanted him to go. She stared at him, her young-old face shifting underneath her heavy stage make-up. She was blunt. “You shouldn’t go. No one is forcing you.”

But he was only paying half-attention to her words, he was absorbed in the darkness of the theater, feeling the heavy velvet curtains, breathing in the air, dusty and smelling of old sweat and face powder. It might be the last time he would ever come here _. Good riddance._

“Jimmy, are you listening to me?”

Gillian’s voice cut sharply through his vague thoughts. 

“Don’t you want me to be a hero, Ma?” he asked, innocently, not missing her little flinch.

He offered her a cigarette. “You can’t smoke in here,” she said, accepting. He lit it for her, watching as the cigarette travelled to her shapely mouth. She breathed in deep, and exhaled.

She regarded him thoughtfully.

“It’s not _me_ you got to prove something to, Jimmy.”

He wanted to tell her-- well, _everything_ \-- to go to her side like as he always had, spill his guts to her. To Gillian, to his mother, to his best friend. Oh, it shamed him to think that, but it was true, mostly.

Gillian was, in his very first memory, a bright angel, complete with golden curls and feathery wings. Her lips pressed against his new-baby skin, leaving a red mark. Indelible, marked out forever.

He had always been his mother's son.

(If she ever had been an angel, she had fallen long ago.)

He gave her a kiss now, half-way from her cheek and her lips.

(Always half-way with her, from a son to a lover. But no, he shouldn’t think like that — )

She accepted it, gently blowing smoke into his face.

“Have fun talking to Angela,” was her parting shot.

***

Angela froze.

“I’ll send you money,” he promised.

“I won’t need it.”

They both looked at her swollen belly.

Her mouth hardened.

***

Nucky, he didn’t tell until after he had signed up, so it would be too late to do anything about it. Nucky shook his head, half-admiring, half-disgusted. “You’ve got guts, kid,” he said, “I’ll give you that.” Jimmy thanked him, and they shook hands. 

The Commodore, he didn’t bother to go see. He left it to Gillian and Nucky to sort the old man out.

Irresponsible, he knew, but hadn’t he proved that he wasn’t capable of taking a hold of his responsibilities?

Not just yet, anyway.

 

***  
The mud was endless.

It stretched out to the horizon. In his clouded vision, it seemed like the world had transformed into a raw and open grave. The shelling had lightened up a bit, so he could, if he wanted to, peer out to No Man’s Land. Over there, the Germans. He felt a hand yank him down as shots fired, felt the warm breath of another. Familiar.

“Don’t you have any sense, Darmody?” rasped out his rescuer. Jones was staring at him furiously.

His build was slighter than Jimmy's, but they shared the same shock of fair hair, the same hungry expression. "What were you, before?" he'd asked, causally one night. Jimmy struggled to answer. In Atlantic City, of course, he'd never had to explain who he was. Everyone already knew.

"I was going to college, Princeton." He decided on the truth, partial as it was. And Jones gave a little sneer. _A college man._

Jones had no exalted background.

He'd been a shipping clerk, a job that had bored him stiff, he said.

Jones was English, and pragmatic. Though he sounded nothing like what Jimmy had expected Englishmen to sound like. Admittedly, before now, all the Englishmen he had encountered were on the stage -- stage Englishmen, in fact. But Jones was nothing like that. Sometimes he was virtually indecipherable, his words twisted into unfamiliar shapes, and rattled out too quickly, sentences bit off almost desperately as he had no time at all.

When he’d asked Jones where he was from, he’d answered briefly, “The North,” which wasn’t too helpful, but...

“I was just curious,” Jimmy managed to say, which got him a slap.

“Are all Americans this stupid, or are you just special?” said Jones, pushing his helmet back, revealing a clump of mud-streaked hair.

Injured pride warred with embarrassment. Pride won out.

“ _I’m special_.”

Jones laughed, and shook his head. Jimmy pulled his head down, feeling like he had failed a test, but in what he didn’t know.

***  
The fear was paralysing. It clung to him like a second skin.

 _If I survive this, I won’t be afraid of anything ever again._

It helped, to whisper comforting lies to himself in the dark.

***

The call went up again, to see a picture of Jimmy’s mother. In all honesty, it hadn't occurred to him to lie at first, to say that Gillian was his girl.

He had a picture of Angela too, sitting straight and correct, eyes distant, a serious expression on her face. Her pregnancy had only started to fill out her out, body and face. It was still a thin face. Her beauty, her true beauty, lay in her dark, lustrous hair, gently curling down her back.

She had sent the photograph in one of her letters.  

He never shared Angela.

At first he refused to share Gillian as well, no matter how hard the other men begged. It was the principle of the thing, he said. But eventually he caved, exchanging the picture for favors: a pack of cigarettes, a set of extra rations, a pair of dry socks. It did feel a little like he was whoring Gillian out -- but as pictures went, it was tame. No exposed breasts, and little in the way of titillation. For him, anyway.

In a way, he thought she would understand.

 

Jones clambered over the sprawling bodies, and perched on a sack of potatoes. He gave the photograph a cursory look before shifting his attention to Jimmy. He adjusted an invisible pair of spectacles.

“So. Tell Doctor Freud, how long have you wanted to fuck your mother?”

A stunned silence.

Jimmy shrugged.

From puberty on, he said with a grin.

 _Only half-joking..._

***

The line was endless, snaking around the corner and doubling back again. They waited impatiently for the line to move, but it quickly became apparent that they have to spend the entire afternoon waiting in line for five minutes with distracted prostitute.

“Come on,” said Jones.

 

***  
It’s a sunny day. Flawless, really, if you ignored stench of the dead, or the sight of them.

The order came in -- they were going over the top.

 

***  
He woke up. He could not move.

 

***  
They find a dark corner in a place that was _all_ dark corners. He was pushed against the wall. He know they couldn’t be so far away from the whorehouse itself. He can hear the faint moans, thumps, and cries, thankfully muffed. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in this situation, in place like this, although this wasn’t exactly how...

A voice in the dark, crouched in from of him, said, “Don’t think about it.”

 

***  
The hour. The hour lasted an eternity. The weapons were checked and re-checked. The runners were sent, up and down the trenches. The officers adjusted their watches. They waited.

After the hour was up, everything happened so fast.

 

***  
The nurse told him that they were able to save his leg. Her smile faded at the face of his stony glare.

“Ingratitude won’t get you very far,” she said tartly.

 

***  
Jones ran his hand over his stomach, and pulled down his mud splattered pants. Nervously, he thanked God ( _some God_ ) that he had bothered to wash that day. Oh, he didn't want to be trembling, he didn’t want to show his weakness, to show his _need_.

But he was.

But he did.

Jones’s hands dug into his thighs.

 

***  
The shell landed near him. Extremely near. That was the last time he could remember hearing anything. It must have been chaos, there must have been screams from the men next to him, beside him. His leg tore from under him. He felt that sickening crunch of his muscles rippling, of his bones breaking.

He was falling...

 

***  
Eight months.

He was at the hospital for eight months, two weeks, one day and twelve hours.

 

***

Jones stood up. He touched Jimmy’s lips briefly.

Not without a little affection, he said, "Your turn next.”

 

***  
He fell into a shell-crater, it was the only reason he survived.

He stayed there, at the bottom with the dead men and the stagnant water, mired in things too horrible to think about, too horrible to remember. He couldn’t scream or retch. He wanted to die, but he couldn't do that either. 

He was still alive, still horribly alive. 

He stayed there until darkness fell.  Eventually, he crawled out of the hole and back to the trench.  

 

He was the only one who made it back. 

***  
Everything is a choice, he told himself.

There were letters for him, some even a year old. Now that he had a permanent address of sorts, they just pored in. Nucky’s letters were gossipy, light on the facts and heavy on insinuations. Apparently, word had gotten out that that Jimmy Darmody was a hero. Why he couldn’t imagine. Maybe because he had survived when others had died. A coincidence, fate, luck. God knows. ( _Some God, indeed._ )

He chose this. _  
_  
He thinks of the shrapnel in his leg. Are there bits of bones in them? Jones would have died anyway ( _it’s not my fault_ ) and it’s oddly comforting to think that he’s dug into Jimmy's flesh. Marked out, again. Marked out, always.

He would always walk with a limp. _  
_

Angela’s letter was brusque and to the point. Thomas was born almost seven months to the day he had shipped out. They had to move into a smaller apartment, where the landlady wasn’t so picky about who her tenants were. Jimmy’s last letter had arrived almost a year ago. They needed money. Under her careful words was a challenge: _are you going to claim us or are you going let us go?_

He was going back to Atlantic City.

He was going to become something more than Nucky’s blunt instrument.

Gillian’s letter was meandering, it included everything from the local gossip to observations of ladies’ hair. _People are starting to picket, they say the war’s gone on long enough. Everyone asks about you. They care about you, Jimmy. You ought to see Tommy. He’s just like you were at that age._

 _A little cherub.  
_

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the past.

Failing that, he tried to imagine the future.

 

There was nothing in either direction.


End file.
